Lola,California

Stan Stroh - 3rd Ward Open Call

2011-10-22T19:19:00.000-07:00

Stan Stroh - 3rd Ward Open Call

Taxi Amigo | Edie Meidav | Blog Post | Red Room

2011-10-04T16:32:00.000-07:00

Taxi Amigo | Edie Meidav | Blog Post | Red Room

Literary Permission | Edie Meidav | Article/Story/Poem/Essay | Red Room

2011-10-04T16:20:00.000-07:00

Literary Permission | Edie Meidav | Article/Story/Poem/Essay | Red Room

Radio essay on Grace with Children | Edie Meidav | Blog Post | Red Room

2011-10-04T16:16:00.000-07:00

Radio essay on Grace with Children | Edie Meidav | Blog Post | Red Room

The Quivering Pen: My First Time: Edie Meidav

2011-09-06T12:21:00.000-07:00

The Quivering Pen: My First Time: Edie Meidav: My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from...

A free Lola for you

2011-08-12T05:03:00.001-07:00

For you who might be mildly strapped among the Internet chorus of angels, and who is not an angel, and who is not mildly strapped, a free book. Yes, a Lola:

http://davidabramsbooks.blogspot.com/2011/08/friday-freebie-lola-california-by-edie.html

Parade of Devastating Beauty

2011-07-21T00:51:00.000-07:00

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/07/20/must-read-novels-the-devil-all-the-time-lola-california-the-borrower-reviewed.html

Must-Read Novels
Great new novels: hippie California

A Parade of Cures: The Devastating Beauty of Lola, California

‘Lola, California’ By Edie Meidav. 448 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Edie Meidav's Lola, California is titled after the name two girls, Lana and Rose, give themselves. They stole their name from the identity-bending hit by The Kinks (Lana is Lola One, Rose Lola Two). The Lolas shared a thick, impenetrable friendship, and Meidav captures exactly the sweetness of girlhood co-dependency (think Heavenly Creatures, but healthier).

This gorgeous, audacious novel goes far beyond a story of two girls, though. Lana and Rose grew up in Berkeley, California in the 1980s, and the book is as much about that town and the millennial Northern California zeitgeist as any character. Meidav is harrowingly precise in her descriptions of the place, where the eucalyptus “smelled like both cat pee and colonialism” and the men “focused on outwitting actuarial odds by their faithfulness to California protocols: ease, cheekbones, the low glycemic index of their diet, fire trail hikes, cardiovascular gestures, wealth, Tuscan vegetables, phytonutrients, heart-benefiting, and cancer-fighting volunteerism, the kind who into their fifties remain manboys, pursuing life-risking activities without ever wiping off that constant smile. If misfortune happens to such men, a hemorrhaging bank account or loss of an actual limb, such men call it process or a learning experience, ready to die before admitting failure, failure bad as a hairweave, a condition practically requiring surrender of the state’s driving license.”

Yes, that sentence is long. Meidav’s prose is writerly: exact yet maximalist, prodigiously lyrical. Together with the novel’s jump-cut structure and length, Meidav asks her readers to slow down. The opposite of a page turner in the best way, the novel prompts us to linger, re-read, flip back, and figure the damned thing out.

But don’t worry: Lola, California is no modernist convolution. Meidav offers more than pretty sentences. This book has plot in spades . . . (to read more, go to the link above)

At the days tick down towards Mahler’s execution, Vic terminally ill, and everyone faces more choice: stay or go? . . . Lola, California is a startling novel, as prodigiously smart as it is technically proficient. Her characters may be narcissistic zeligs, but Meidav is an American original.

—Anne Trubek, author of A Skeptic's Guide To Writers' Houses

THE DAILY BEAST
Anne Trubek is the author of A Skeptic's Guide To Writers' Houses.

the evolutionary factor that will all make us into hydroencephalites?

2011-07-20T07:52:00.000-07:00

Favoring quick thumbs and immunity to electromagnetic frequencies . . .

Readings

2011-07-17T04:54:00.000-07:00

What is it about collaboration that is such a joy? Yesterday I had the pleasure of seeing Brielle Korn (of the band Fortune Baby), dancer Amii Legendre (of her own multivalent choreographic productions), and Kevin Salem (once of Dumptruck, now also in music with/for himself) perform as part of a reading in Woodstock, last Hudson Vally reading until, perhaps, the same line-up comes out September 10th for a reading on Poet's Walk as part of some visionary Scenic Hudson enterprise.
I remember years ago seeing Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, play accordion in relation to some reading in San Francisco and I got it: ah, the reading as a kind of cabinet of curiosities, presenting delights for the senses, rather than a kind of staid Author-Audience relation with that hyphen forever calcified.
So to those of you who have come or will come, thank you for helping me erode that hyphen.
Sending you good thoughts from the traveling part of the "book tour". I must put quotation marks around that. I must. (Cf. the movie Already Famous for what I consider a real tour.)
To your happy day,
Edie

PS For you who may be in Seattle, or know others who might be, Wednesday night at 7 pm I'm reading/conversing at Elliott Bay in Seattle at 7 pm. (206) 624-6600, 1521 Tenth Avenue
Seattle WA 98122; for personalized copies: orders@elliottbaybook.com

PPS Last summer dates: 7/23 in Mendocino's The Gallery w/Beth Lisick; 7/28 in Berkeley's Mrs. Dalloway's with party feeling; 7/30 in Gualala's 4-Eyed Frog with coastal feeling; 8/4 in San Francisco's Book Passage with Oscar Villalon's interlocution; 8/5 in Montclair, CA with the brilliant Carolyn Cooke. Come run some intervention.

Excerpt #2, gogo dancing, up at Sundance Channel (Em and Lo)

2011-07-14T14:37:00.001-07:00

Thanks, Em and Lo!

http://www.sundancechannel.com/sunfiltered/2011/07/new-summer-reading-lola/

Recent speech acts

2011-07-11T03:23:00.000-07:00

http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/07/10/071011-arts-books-lola-california-1-3/

Dear ones,

Thank you to Oblong Books in Rhinebeck for such a pleasurable launch of the book, and thanks to all who came out or were there in spirit. If writing is a solitary task, these moments of conversation help remind me of the purpose and meaning behind the idea of trying to write and reach another.

Meanwhile, thank you as well to another thoughtful reveiwer: http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/07/10/071011-arts-books-lola-california-1-3/

Sending good thoughts,

Edie

Here's the link to the free music, constantly updated, for you

2011-07-05T08:59:00.000-07:00

Excerpt from Lola now up at Electric Literature

2011-07-05T08:27:00.000-07:00

Hi all,

In honor of the Lola book's birthday, Electric Literature is featuring some excerpts:

http://electricliterature.com/blog/2011/07/05/excerpt-lola-california-by-edie-meidav/

I'm watching the baby float toward its bulrushes.

And for you who have written to say how much you already like the new songs by Kevin Salem which are part of the Lola "score", a sort of musical conversation with the book, please know more -- really beautiful ones -- are coming down the pipeline. For the free download of the early songs, go to www.kevinsalem.com/Lola.html.

Meanwhile, an Authority has just implored me to ask people to write firecracker-starred reviews at your neighborhood online bookseller. This, too, apparently, is important.

Thank you for your support. I promise you get a more newsworthy post soon!

Yours in logos,
Edie

Tomorrow and beyond

2011-07-04T17:12:00.000-07:00

Dear friends,

Please note that the music for LOLA is now available -- free download -- at www.kevinsalem.com/Lola.html.

Also, may I be so bold as to ask you, if you were considering buying LOLA anyway, to go to your local bookstore or Amazon tomorrow? Apparently a certain mass movement in the beginning makes a difference.

Please don't do this if you're planning on coming to a reading where I'll get to see you in person! Only if you're not.

To your future,

Edie

Interview with Nina Shengold on LOLA,CALIFORNIA (and SWAMPLANDIA to boot!)

2011-07-01T09:12:00.000-07:00

Nina is one of the last of a disappearing breed? Insightful, intelligent, creative in her own right.

Interview is at:
http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2011/7/Books/Sunshine-States

Some inspiration for you? Writers Recommend at Poets and Writers

2011-06-29T08:13:00.001-07:00

Poets and Writers asked what advice I'd give writers. Here it is:

http://www.pw.org/content/melinda_palacio_7

See other posts which are also interesting.

US Involvement is (Check One) Nefarious; Useful

2011-06-29T08:12:00.000-07:00

I quote:

"Last week, a top official of the U.S. Embassy in Managua dismissed Nicaragua as no longer important to the U.S. and told a Nicaragua Network delegation from the United States that he wanted nothing to do with the country’s political parties, all of which he characterized as “feckless, corrupt, nasty and worthless.”

Despite these comments by Matthew Roth, the political officer of the U.S. Embassy, the U.S. Agency for International Development is funding Nicaraguan groups to provide training in “democratization” and media skills.

Media programs, such as those offered by the International Republican Institute, are supposedly designed to help Nicaraguan media, particularly radio stations, learn to provide fair and balanced coverage. However, leaders of the Association of Nicaraguan Journalists (APN), told the delegation that they intended to teach reporters to oppose the re-election of President Daniel Ortega and to play a double role as reporters and unofficial electoral observers. Jan Howard, the USAID officer for the embassy, acknowledged, “Sometimes they get a little carried away.”

In the 2001 and 2006 presidential elections, the U.S. embassy overtly supported a particular candidate opposed to Ortega. Such public declarations have not been issued this year, although the delegation heard concerns about the possibility of threatening or leading public statements from US officials late in the campaign term as occurred in 2001 and 2006. Such prior statements included threats about the termination of remittances, which many Nicaraguan families rely on. Additionally, the US has urged and even organized a united opposition in past elections. In the current cycle, a representative of the Constitutional Liberal Party implied that the party has privately been encouraged by the US Embassy to withdraw from the race.

The delegation from the Nicaragua Network, which has more than 30 years of experience following Nicaraguan issues, recently concluded a one-week trip to Nicaragua to investigate the role of the United States in the upcoming Nicaraguan elections. The delegation met with officials from the US embassy, Nicaraguan government officials, three political parties and alliances of parties running presidential candidates, and several U.S. and Nicaraguan non-governmental organizations that have received funding from the United States government."

The Sins and Pleasures of Twitter

2011-06-24T04:50:00.003-07:00

Follow @lolacalifornia

A Proto-Lola Piece on Air

2011-06-22T07:17:00.001-07:00

:
When Lola was just a spark in my eye, when I was living on the North Coast of California, back in the days when I was directing the MFA program at the late New College of California, I wrote this germ of a piece in response to a request by editor David Rothenberg (see previous post), also of the late journal Terra Nova (and where do all these late beloved institutions go with their histories and pleasures and infighting? There is a Japanese word for dead web sites, something like "lost pebbles"; what word would be useful in speaking of late, beloved institutions?)to write toward the element of air, I wrote this -- I do not edit it now, I just offer it up to your eyes

AIR

What happens in Northern California is that people get pushed north with their desire for cleaner air. There are huge hulking iron beasts, old logging machines rotting in the hills up here, but the cars which pull off the tortuous curl of Highway One up the coast flash bits of silver upon one another, light refracted off the ocean refracting off their sides. All of this serves as an appropriately spangled metaphor for how people desire their own light and air up here, so proficient at passing one another here without engaging.

Here, on the so-called Redwood Coast, you’ll find small-town America writ large upon the apocalyptic consciousness of California: here you will not find all too many concrete dividers separating your car from your destiny, whether it be to careen into oncoming traffic or off the highway and into the ocean.

Any such dividers you do happen to find are recent afterthoughts. More often, on Highway One, you find plenty of sites where one waits for sleek cows, themselves oddly individualistic. The cows, like the people, amble oceanward; in the bovines’ case, across the highway from one spit of land, leaving one spot for better air, better grazing on a more perilous cliff. We happen to share with the cows this instinct for ingenuous destruction.

Construction foremen will boast with a certain happy hubris of a house which they are building on a rapidly eroding section of coastal land. It’s the county’s responsibility, they’ll tell you, to keep the land solid fifty feet oceanward from a house’s outermost perimeter. A complicated system of metal braces helps, part of the house’s foundation. This turns out to be ironically similar in form to that invoked by the old jokes about the cockroach architecture, what will be left of New York in the event of a nuclear holocaust.

The metal braces here are not afterthought but West-Coast-style insurance, a certain fatalism to them: they do help to moor these devil-may-care houses, so that, allegedly, when the cliffs erode (which they will all do, give or take ten or twenty or fifty years) the house will stay propped up on its metal buckle, bound to more steady ground, if you don’t count the earthquakes.

Where in a prior age some of our greatest designing minds were drawn to shipbuilding, men who longed for the full wind in their faces, manning shipyards in Oakland or Brooklyn or Penzance, now those same souls are constructing houses on cliffside dwellings in California.

But mostly up here engineering is left to nature. Consider those cows again: their hooves on those cliffs are more confident than any Detroit or Tokyo could dream of when it comes to sheer tread factor. A few centimeters before total hurl-down-the-mountains-at-your-own-leisure death, these cows do what we do: ruminate, if not on mortality and hubris; their digestion remains unimpaired by thinking of which species of catastrophe might await in the next moment.
Perhaps it is the imminence of catastrophe that buffers the human dwellers more tightly in their mantle of self-absorption. For every young promising student who gets killed by a driver-under-the-influence, there are twenty other drivers speeding by, blissful when their tailgating in their monster vehicles succeeds and they can force drivers into ditches off the road. What is self-absorption, after all? Could we say it entails a lack of the friction usually made up of, in equal parts, conscience and curiosity?

In the few markets, the post office, people do pass one another quite easily, friction-free, their bodies smooth or rough but able to glide by.

What mostly gets exchanged are molecules, transfering silently from one host to another. The lack of engagement is not a mobile air purifier here, as it might be, say, during cold season within a crowded New York subway compartment, when one passenger turns away, slightly, from another. It is rather a willful act of moral hygiene; failing to interact with a stranger helps one hold more closely to one’s own plot of land, near the promised land of the ocean, the one to which we will all one day subside and return.

This is why California has a partial monopoly on the apocalypse. It believes in the promised land and it has the front-row seat on the promised land; not land at all but the great primordial Pacific, named by Balboa on what must have been a deceptive calm-water day for the wild Pacific.

Out here, apocalpyse takes many forms. One can almost sense the Silicon Valley former billionaires sighing their impatience in the supermarket aisles, itching for life’s video-game to move to its final conclusion, with the ultimate crash so near, the crash that goes beyond the mereness of personally borne mortality. This is why some readers skip to the last scene of a book, and why, for many people, this Redwood Coast happens to be one of their favorite rural outposts, some 100 or 200 miles north of San Francisco.

Meanwhile, the cyber-bubble of success, not seen in these parts since the gold rush, may have burst, slightly; but there is that annoying fact that one must share the breathing-space of the country with others: in this way, the apocalpyse is delayed; one cannot get to one’s cozy cabin retreat because there are still people approaching. One must retreat from the retreat.

And this land unfortunately is not the tabula rasa that might have appeared on the Web screen, the immediate gratification of a seemingly uninhabited strip of ocean. Coastal getaway! as the highly oxygenated ads scream, swirling blues and whites in flashing pixels.

Yes, there are those who have come here to get away but on a permanent basis: whole tribes of people. They are stepping outside of history and occasionally off the grid -- of electricity, yes, using their solar panels and compost outhouses -- but also off the grid of the task-reward systems prevalent in cities. Here are the artist tribes; the back-to-the-landers who came circa 1970, from Maine and upstate New York and south-side Chicago and Berkeley and all spots between; there are the expatriates from Germany and England who feel themselves to have arrived at the very mule train itself, their childhood archetypes of savage America. There are the aforementioned Silicon Valley billionaires and then the pot growers who grow their booty on others’ land, to avoid having their own repossessed should the cops discover their plants, growers who in their particular breed of libertarianism-so-long-as-you-don’t-screw -with-mine, a not-so-new kind of NIMBYism, will also hide with guns to shoot those who tread too close to their treasured plants.

There are the lonely men in plaid shirts furtively buying a six-pack of domestic beer at five o’clock on a Friday in the one supermarket which is, subtly, in that subliminal discourse that is caste in California, earmarked as being Their Kind of Supermarket (corn masa flour for tortillas, jugs of water and cheap wine on sale, giant fried pig ears). Right across the highway happens to be the Fancy Supermarket, with equivalent prices but which does not advertise so openly that it takes food stamps. The fancy market sells thirty varieties of non-American cheese and also offers its clientele a tasting bin for olives.

But it is in the pig-ear supermarket, that you will find a more representative mix of the population that is scattered up here, among the redwoods and mountains: the state troopers and electrical line layers, the loggers who have bumper stickers that say Save My Sanity, Kill an Environmentalist. There are the seasonal workers and there are also the last of the Pomo or Konkow Indians holding on, trying to make a life for themselves in the towns or the all-too-depressed reservations, land lost behind the crowded trees and mountain wilderness you can still find here. There are also, to mix cultural terms, the nisei and issei Mexicans, first- and second-generation, exercising their right of return, repossessing their land while sporting various arcana from the detritus of American society, whether it be a vintage Brooklyn Dodgers coat or a Britney midriff shirt.

In the fancy supermarket, you might find those who might have been, by birth or vocation, slotted for pig ears but prefer goat cheese, and again, everywhere, those Silicon Valley weekenders, picking up their copy of the New York Times before continuing to chug north or south in their mammoth gas-guzzling tanks. Sports utility would seem to be an oxymoron, until you see how lifestyle and its conduits have here, as elsewhere, become a little mechanized.
What does get exchanged up here happens, as in other climes, mainly within tribal affinities; though perhaps such affinities are more transparent within such a linear community. Unlike life in most towns, up here, along Highway One, you do not find the serendipity native to urban life. A child born and raised here easily enumerates the places one can go to and come from, the horizon line of the possible. You drive down the fittingly named One, a declivity along the cliffs, the ocean to its west and the mountains to the east. You bear only specific destinations in mind, nothing that can catch you unawares, really, short of events on the spectrum of the apocalpse -- fires, earthquakes, hell and turbation. Otherwise: cars pass you, cars tailgate you, then you pass cars.

There is not the surprise of a face appearing around a corner, as in any of the great cities, whether Venice, Manhattan, or Paris; and the human encounter and exchange that open up by surprise. It doesn’t take a Jane Jacobs to understand what is lacking up here. Breathing room ends up meaning room for me to breathe. As Denis Johnson remarked about a town in this specific part of the world in his penultimate novel, Already Dead, Gualala, the town whose name means confluence of rivers in an almost-lost Native American tongue, is a town which ignores the sublimity of its natural surroundings in order to best underline the repetitive and linear nature of much of what people think they need. This is a different sort of confluence.

Because people come up here for their own version of Lebensraum, the idea of living room first used in such a specific sense by Hitler’s Germany, in which Austria was to be annexed in order to provide the Germans a bit of breathing space, a relaxation of the senses. This rural part of Northern California has been annexed by various names. The Chamber of Commerce likes to call it the Redwood Coast, meaning those towns that commence with Stewarts Point, lost in its sheep pastures and its tall metal cranes falling into ravines, moving up through Point Arena. But the real estate agents like to call it the Banana Belt, the area within the Redwood Coast known for grabbing the bit of California sun managing to burn through the fog: Banana Belt because it is shaped like an unrelenting smile and there is some hint of tropicalismo in the people who have come up here for all their various reasons.

What becomes clear is that if anyone is having a party, it is the treetops. The people for the most part can have a dreary despair, like the 24-year-old scion of a hardware-store-owning family around these parts, already drunk at two in the afternoon of a Friday, narrowly avoiding the cars and throwing out a swaggering thumb to get a ride just about anywhere.

What is it that, at least in the States, makes our less breathable cities great and our more recent ideas about how to scalp and carve out a livable existence in rural America so abysmal? When one goes back to Hitler -- and why always him, except that he provides such a fine example of individual points of will coalescing in a terribly singular will, when what we are looking at is man or woman exercising their will and sense of virtue in nature. You all must know some back-to-the-landers, people who live righteously, use solar panels, lug their own water from a well and compost from their outhouse. And if you don’t know them, or even know about them, that’s okay; they already have taken up squatting rights in your brain, existing in your consciousness, a fine sieve of virtue through which one can always sift oneself, find oneself wanting. Once my brother, the recently minted restoration ecologist (what is he restoring? people always inquire) asked me how many trees had gone into the making of my first novel -- and when one puts two such opposite forces on a scale, of course the human creation comes out wanting.

Outside my window, where I sit writing this, on the Redwood Coast, people have been living off the grid, in enough pockets, that the idea is as familiar to anyone as the New York subway system was familiar to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, living below the city’s structure and tapping its juice for his own personal light. But out here, we have been experiencing the euphonically named “rolling blackouts”, California’s energy consumption having reached the outer limits of possibility in a state in which the word limit is practically banned from your vocabulary the second you apply for a driver’s licence, i.e., citizenship in a state in which mobility, chewing up all that clean air, is promised you if you just as in, say, the French ideas for Algeria or any other part of its empire: s’il vous plait obey our basically republican ideals of assimilation.

And to create a Californian correlate to the term writ on the pamphlet for application to French citizenship -- francisation -- one can be well californiasé if one follows the statewide articles as bold and simple as a Sierra Club graphic: to wit, individualism, self-sufficiency, a taste for adventure. True, the north is always tugging at the south to secede, and vice versa -- mostly about water but also about air, and the pollution, the air pockets -- and yes, the north and south are split primarily along the axis of political virtue, the north being in some cosmic rotation of the dial more left, barring those loggers, and the south, barring the denizens and hangers-on of Hollywood, tending toward the kind of Ronald Reaganism that says: You seen one redwood tree, you seen them all, and defines ketchup as a vegetable.

Funny that a state which is called golden believes so much in the alchemical properties of air and wind, fire and water. But primarily air -- there is a bargain people make when they agree to live out here, and it has nothing to do with the particular angle of sun that will etch their faces more deeply, a kind of cattle branding, and it has everything to do with a greed for that Puritan virtue that a New England stalwart like Cotton Mather might have been happy to have seen extrapolated from his original plan.

Because out here one can see every inference of the Constitution played out, almost as personified adventure heroes, playing dungeons and dragons. The local paper will frequently write out how to foil police attempts regarding search and seizure -- there is an insecurity, what religious writers would call humility, about the grandeur of nature out here, and what one can do to stick one’s finger, lamely, in the wind, preventing it from blowing too hard your way.
Which, apart from all Buddhist or Hindu influenced ideas of meditation and spiritual discipline, is why so many people have reminders everywhere. Breathe, the reminders say. Just breathe.

Breathe in, breathe out, breathe some more. That sometimes seems to be the limit of human aspiration, out here where the air still blows (mostly) free.

About Music from the Day the World Was Supposed to End

2011-06-22T07:17:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start putting up little foundling pieces I've written in this recent period, here in this safe viewing space. This first one comes from last month, written the day after I saw an amazing performance at The Falcon:

On Permanent Waitress Leave: A Note on Historic Music Last Night

Dedicated to those about to enter the real world

According to certain sectors, last night the world was supposed to end.
Ignoring this fact, last night I went to a music performance at The Falcon. And in theory, this could be a very simple statement: culture exists and people go out and enjoy it in particular venues.
And yet, and yet. Other families may have figured out better how one has a life going out at night, alone or as a couple, after kids arrive but we seem to remain forever in the pre-training-wheels stage, even eight years into having kids, staying in our cloistered home night after night, dealing with this one’s urgency or that one’s need for the cuddle of routine, so going out – solo or as a couple -- is a rare treat.
So that The Falcon, in upstate New York, in the small town of Marlborough, became my mecca last night: a giant, heaving, raftered, and yes, falcon-colored barn of a place perched over an unusually beautiful waterfall which, in its past, overflowed all human intervention and hence the lower landing requires some impressively cantilevered stones to remind all of the potential for revolution, that is, natural overthrow.
The Falcon in its acoustical and natural splendor is the dream space of some 1970s music impresario whose name I didn’t catch, one of these white-haired, smooth-cheeked people fired by a certain post-1960s idealism who has managed to stay preternaturally young: he announced the musicians with avuncular warmth, having arranged an endless series of evenings for musicians who come not because they get paid but because the audience is urged to donate. In turn, there is never a charge to come hear music, only a gentle solicitude on the part of the place’s waiters who carry out their black-clothed functions as if part of some elite monastic cadre.
You will see later why I say they are elite.
I came to see David Rothenberg play. I had met David years ago when I was following out one of my own new monastic precepts linked with the idea of starting to write. At the time, I was copy-editing at both Ms. and Esquire magazines, if you can manage the gender spin in my head as I walked the twenty blocks between the two jobs. I was also giving up, slowly, the idea that I could edit film as a day job in order to support my writing habit. I was finishing my first novel, begun in remote hill towns in Sri Lanka, and was living in what felt to me as if it were a one-room palace, on 104th and West End in Manhattan, a rent-stabilized, loft-bed, old-wood tiny place with large prewar windows looking onto the sidewalk in front of a halfway house where a bunch of largely unrepentant addicts rumbled.
In short, I was in a sort of heaven for a fiction writer.
Except I was a bit disconsolate. Whenever I eyed the racks of literary magazines at any of my favorite bookstores, I could not quite find the literary conversation that would have me. The truth of this, rather than suggesting that I was a youngster at an adult table, is that I could not find the literary conversation I liked, the one with enough rigor and play, the one with a certain archetypal boom! in the heart when I read it.
At the same time, given the paltriness of the funds flowing into my bank account, some of my relatives were suggesting I seize control of the tracks and just, darn it, switch them. That I should become, for instance, an insurance grantwriter, making what at the time was the princely sum of fifty thousand a year. Others thought I should use my interest in science – as well as coming from a family of scientists -- to become, well, naturlich, a science writer!
But as I now, in my latterday cloak of college professor, often find myself counseling graduating seniors: there are no compromise professions. Or, rather, there exist too many, a plethora. The world will suggest that if you have a certain aptitude and at least a quarter of a calling, one can crunch qualitative factors and emerge with a sum, a profession that puts one close to the fire yet leaves one neither maker nor, to stretch the metaphor, marshmallow-toaster. For example, the dancer whose parents suggest she become an arts administrator. The writer who, without true interest in the fine art of editing or selling, ends up in publishing or a literary agency. The filmmaker who ends up writing pop culture reviews.
I do not mean to suggest that there should only be artists and creators in the world: I only mean to say that it is necessary, at these hinge moments, to listen to that still voice that tells one that one will better serve the world by following a path the masses don’t support. In such moments, it is salutary to leave aside for the moment the distracting question of selfishness versus service, because, with Joseph Campbell, with all others in priestly professions, with everyone who has come from post-1960s California, either metaphorically or not, I still believe we serve best when we follow our bliss.
And, as a good friend often reminds me, there are paintings in a dentist’s office; imagine the world without music; and on. Art, an undertaking which can be questioned at its most foundational principle by the simple question is it self-indulgent? can also be profoundly generous.

That said, the world is full of gatekeepers who are dedicated to keeping those below from bliss-following, whether toward or away from art and its creation, and these gatekeepers are expert at land-grabbing zones in a young head. They are also morphers: gatekeepers can appear in the form of someone who is interviewing you for a job or a good friend or anyone who is a tad too certain when telling you the restriction of your pathways. In other words, even for cancer patients, there are always outliers, those who beat the odds and survive.
And yet, in my New York aerie, I was feeling the pull of these gatekeeping voices. Was I deluding myself? Should I just chuck in my writing habit, glistening and polished after so many years of daily tending, and just feed bits of my soul into a meat-grinder, take on a day job that would suck the last bit of writing out of me?
My own former mentor, Peter Matthiessen, had counseled me years earlier: never take a profession that is too much like writing! Keep your fiction pure!
I had taken his words as a true edict, thinking it much better to be a carpenter, a farmer, waitress, to learn from the world and its people and its handiwork. And yet in my chosen career pathway, to be a waitress, I had been fired too many times to recount. My father could not hide his glee whenever I was fired: had I graduated from a fancy college only to serve finicky customers Caesar salad with dressing on the side? Because, unlike Dana Spiotta and many other memorable waiter-writers, I never got waitressing right. At one fancy Italian restaurant in Berkeley, I poured the wine wrong. I chatted too much with the customers. Or I couldn’t hide, in one Venice Boulevard diner, what my face thought of a particular customer. The Venice boss, in his past one of those enthusiastic Kinsey-experiment participants, had a tone both kindly and sorrowful when he told me the news. He pulled his overlong blond handlebar moustache, saying, I’m sorry, Edie, we’re putting you on Waitress Leave. But it’s that particular kind of Waitress Leave – permanent.
Within my permanent waitress leave, therefore, years later, living in New York, somewhat ignoring my mentor Matthiessen’s advice since I worked with print in my day job, copy-editing at Ms. and Esquire, I could not help but feel disconsolate about the literary conversation that I imagined. But I found it, in a small literary journal, called Terra Nova, published by MIT Press, one that happened to catch my eye at one of my favorite bookstores where I had spent some of those desultory hours, rich in a kind of melancholic curiosity.
When David Rothenberg, the journal’s editor, published an excerpt of my early novel, he then asked to meet me and so we began our long conversation, one that has followed spirit as much as letter in that months can go by without any contact.
But last night I thought I should change the terms a bit and go out for once to hear music, that proposition simple enough when you’re young and starting out and not when you have two cuddle-hungry cute kids. In the middle of my path, a path the outcome of all those many choices made years ago, having that day met some parents at the college where I teach, therefore, I went to The Falcon.

David is one of those kids who started playing an instrument at school when he was in third grade and, a true bliss follower, never stopped: he has played his clarinet since in some unusual settings, to whales, to birds, and most recently recently to Laurie Anderson, being someone who is unafraid of sending a hero a CD of his, a book, homage. With his philosopher’s bent (he teaches both philosophy and music at New Jersey’s Institute of Technology) he has written books about some of the settings in which he has played: Why Birds Sing and A Thousand-Mile Song among his other publications. Last night he was playing with a friend of his, a pianist named Lewis Porter
who is a full-time music professor at Rutgers-Newark, a guy listed in the program as, in quotation marks, a “helluva pianist”, a quotation pulled from Jazz Times, a writer-pianist who had written a biography of Coltrane about which Coltrane’s son, Ravi, said: it’s the best there is.
This is what I knew.
Now, my family and I had just come back from two months in Cuba where the music, whenever we heard it, was sublime but lacked the quality I always listen for: it wasn’t historic.
Historic music, to me, means that moment when you, whether listener or performer, encounter a moment of playing or interaction, improvised or set, that lets you know you have been witness to a hair-tingling moment. The moment will never happen again. All the choices that led up to it made the moment possible.
Part of the nature of first love, I had been thinking that day, is that it seems more intense because the face of the beloved is the face of your unmarked future: immense, big as Oz.
And part of hearing historic music is that the moment hinges: the music may never again be so good, but all the musical context prior to it made the moment possible.
And you are part of history even when you are just a listener, forming part of the experiment, changing its very nature by your listening.
Until this night, I had not realized that I had been a bit disappointed, while we were in Cuba, with the lack of historicity in the music. What we heard felt like slipping into a warm bath of tradition, an endless cycle, which could take us into its warm or familiar or sexy embrace, but could just as easily not have us listen, a big fat sloppy mama, not a whore but a mama.
This is not to say that during our two months we did not hear good music. For example, one night we braved a doorman line in Havana, our fellow queuers young gussied-up prostitutes, foreigners, and a few wealthy Cubans wanting to plunk down an ordinary Cuban’s month’s salary to see the salsa legends Los Van Van, a group that manages to turn salsa into a narrative bully pulpit. On another occasion, a black-market street-seller had pressed on me some lively protest CDs by the group Los Aldeanos and I’d thought their music made Cuban reggaeton seem much more dynamic than the mind-numbing quality of the majority of Mexican reggaeton.
But in the main, the music we had heard, recorded or live, had stayed within certain conventions so deeply encoded that they form part of the national neural pathway: nothing disturbed, nothing pushed against surprise.
So back to last night: David and Louis began with some piece they called an ode to New Jersey impressionism, which as a phrase would seem an oxymoron – impressionism? in New Jersey? -- and yet the music did spill with a force like the waterfall outside The Falcon. Louis’ head seemed to be in a vise, nodding assent; he clearly liked David, who gets wracked by an internal rhythm when he performs, jumping and popping all over the stage, that inner rhythm only occasionally coming out in overt music. I realized quickly these two trafficked in covert music and its transformation, as if each were confessing private dreams to his instrument. Between them, there was a patient assertion in the way long notes or passages were held; the piano would deepen in a series of open fifths, making the music into some jazzy Debussy water music.
The group of us at a table, all David’s friends who had been published by him way back in the past of the late Terra Nova, which we realized he had used as if it were his proto-Facebook, often laughed in recognition at his antics, given the shamanic energy he infuses into performance. He plays like a suffering Jesus, like it hurts but he must continue out of inner necessity, and then, occasionally, will be tender toward his instrument as if he now must needs offer a balm to someone. Behind David and Louis flickered some neopop light sculpture, while around them blared unsettling art by local high school students, and then I heard David introducing his next piece saying: “Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast! As you all know, it’s the best title of classical philosophy. Giordano Bruno wrote it and he was burnt at the stake for writing it.”
At The Falcon, people actually listen: the place offers up a concert in a beautiful restaurant but no one eats while the musicians play. I once read a study that said that the sense of hearing is diminished when one eats, which perhaps goes some of the way to explaining skinny rock musicians, but this certainly seemed to be the case last night: forks perched midway and then were abandoned entirely, though the libations – given that elite cadre of waiters – kept flowing.
David introduced the next piece by mentioning Lou Reed who had apparently told him two weeks ago that every day he listened to Ornette Coleman’s “Lonely Woman”, every single day, but never with words, because “words ruin it.”
They were getting into their set; Louis was biting his lips. The bassist, the leader of the tango band that was headlining, came on for this piece, chewing gum while he played. David’s clarinet squalled and he started hopping more manically. Squall, hop, squall, hop. I was wondering why David kept introducing pieces as being “written by” someone when clearly there was such improvisation to it all, and later Louis explained how proprietary jazz is: you have to pay an artist 125 dollars every time you play or record a piece of his, and there is a way to hide the use of a piece, but much better to be, as it were, open-source.
In the middle of the Ornette Coleman piece, deep in open-source bliss, Louis could not hide his happiness: he looked at his wild partner, smiling, nodding into some deep piano riff. David looked as if he were about to have a seizure. Sometimes, behind them, the sculpture lit up, as if some Juliet were about to appear on a metal balcony, making me wonder whether jazz remains, at this late age, fundamentally a male enterprise, given that I once lived next to a known saxophonist who never once had streams of women coming to his house to play, only young acolytes and legends, all male. I also was thinking about how some musicians seem to have a sadistic relation to their instrument: a dom, submit, dom, submit pattern that becomes the conversation of their music, i.e., what the listener notices. While David and Louis were interested in some kind of conversion of the masses, fitting their title, a true expulsion of the triumphant beast.
Because right then came the highlight of the evening, the historic beat: a Stephen Foster piece, “Hard Times Come Again No More”. One of the best and worst things about jazz is how it is always so ready to throw off its center, yet here the center held. In the pair’s inspired riff off such archetypal, steamboat chord changes, the audience was moved. Louis played it to the hilt, doing cheesecake vibrato octaves, and we were transported to another time. The two of them pulled such watery depths out of the piece that there was a collective intake of breath, an echo of the performers’ energies at the end.
I was thinking too, while watching, of Ernesto Granado, the cinematographer of Fresa y Chocolate, Strawberry and Chocolate, the iconic Cuban film which tore apart certain prejudices: anti-gay, pro-revolutionary. What would Ernesto have thought if he were here? We’d had the luck to meet him on a public bus coming back from the cowboy backcountry of Cuba, and he had taken it upon himself, our last weeks in the country, to try to introduce us to Havana’s artistic intelligentsia. Unlike many we had met, he was not soured on the revolution; it still paid him, both conceptually and actually; and he was filled with an enviable love of his fellow countryman in a fully essentializing, most un-PC manner. When we had gone to see Los Van Van perform, in that crowded club, he had danced with and near us in a sweet rendition that had reminded me of Woody Allen dancing in a fugue of aggrieved coolth in Annie Hall at the beach house, or do I mistake the movie?
If he were transported to The Falcon and were American, he would have raved: This is what I love about Americans! You see? They are filled with life, filled with color! They listen! They can come together despite all their differences!
And yet, the problem or gift of America may be that we are so darned ornery, we persist in seeing everyone as individuals, which is – to go back to the beginning of this whole discussion – what makes choosing a life profession so difficult. You feel such responsibility on your shoulders when you are choosing in a vacuum of collective support or identity. You ask, for one of the most significant times in your life, do I want to become part of this tribe or that tribe? While, in a place like Cuba where the population and roots may be multiethnic but the culture has a homogeneity, tribe fails to matter.
So that in this iconic American moment – jazzy riffs off Stephen Foster, how much more American does it get? – somehow, magically, David and Louis made a historic tribe out of all of us.
Meanwhile, the world was still going to end.
We had been knit together, a bunch of people in America, listening to music linked in subterranean channels to our history; the community we secretly longed for lived.
Meanwhile, in the background, expert waiters slipped people their bills. When the audience went out into the night, the endless rush of that waterfall made it seem that, at least that night, we had performed at least one sacrament correctly, one stolen from our own national religion: we all had made at least one good choice.

A Love Letter to VS Naipaul

2011-06-21T08:46:00.000-07:00

Someone I know responded to Joanne Valin's call to write love letters to VS Naipaul after his now infamous statement that he could, essentially, sniff out a woman's writing and that no woman writer could ever be his equal:

http://lovelettertovsnaipaul.wordpress.com/

The Diviner's Tale; War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning; Unlived Professions

2011-06-21T04:49:00.000-07:00

I just finished Brad Morrow's THE DIVINER'S TALE and was truly impressed; it is rare to find a male writer who can convincingly channel whatever we want to believe might be a female consciousness, and in Morrow's original story, which begins as a sort of Self vs. Self plot, inasmuch as its narrator is cursed/blessed with a power of divination which she doesn't wholly embrace, the consciousness radiates outward to make the ending truly a page-turner. You finish the book and then want to start it again to pick up all the clues, and this recursive urge seems to me to be a strong hallmark of success.

One other aspect of Morrow's book that proves his strength as a writer: he is able to toy with fabulism and magical realism, i.e., what we used to call aspects of the traditional ghost story, and yet does so without sacrificing narrative tension. In other words, ghost stories often fall flat since, in a universe in which anything can happen, an author immediately plays his or her full narrative hand of tension. Yet Morrow's world is spun tightly around these closed, hungry psyches that populate his novel, and so the paranormal becomes congruent with psychology.

I just started this book: the former war correspondent who rejects the mythos of war. So far, so good.

When I wrote CRAWL SPACE, part of my urge was to exercise/exorcise my great admiration of war correspondents, one of many unlived professions I seem to have collected. When I wrote LOLA, CALIFORNIA, I wanted to do the same with any of the hundred and one professions that had seemed possible to me as a child growing up in the incense-laden fumes of Berkeley.

Please find space below to write any of your unlived professions:

New Nicaragua Video posted

2011-06-14T13:10:00.001-07:00

Hi you literate ones,

Just posted, upper lefthand column of www.ediemeidav.com, some truly rough initial footage from the boxing gyms of Nicaragua, taken in 2011.

A sneak peek, more to come from there and Cuba.

Yours,
Edie

New review of David Foster Wallace up

2011-06-08T08:24:00.000-07:00

Lola, California: A Novel

Dear literate ones,

Some six months ago, I wrote this piece for a folio for the enigmatic Conversational Reading, the intelligent blog run by Scott Esposito, considering DFW in his book of essays. See what you think. http://conversationalreading.com/the-quarterly-converstion-issue-24/

Meanwhile:

may I also recommend this book to you?

Daughters of the Revolution

Even if she weren't a friend, I would still love her writing.

Next week, excitingly enough, the songs composed in/around LOLA, by Kevin Salem, come out, available online for free.

Edie

Beautiful New Film for LOLA just released now

2011-06-02T13:01:00.000-07:00

Lola, California: A Novel

Dear friends,

The great director Rebecca Dreyfus just made this beautiful movie in honor of LOLA coming out very soon -- See what you think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6iY2A5EwMM

She used two students of mine and our upstate New York locale, and somehow emerged with a beautiful palette reminiscent of all those 70s films I used to watch back in my lost youth.

Incredible soundtrack by one of my musical heroes, Kevin Salem, who had many interesting alternative soundtracks as well; some sounded like a lost Mexican opera singer was crying her heart out alongside Highway Five. Please note: next week, Salem is coming out with a whole album, available for free, online, with songs composed for LOLA.

I am really thankful.

Please see it and, as they say, if it finds grace in your eyes, recommend it to your Facebook or Internet masses! For this is how I understand such things work. Ask them to pass it on, come to the readings this summer, all that.

(July 9, Oblong/Rhinebeck; July 16, The Golden Notebook/Woodstock; July 20, Elliott Bay/Seattle; July 23, The Gallery/Mendocino with Beth Lisick; July 28, Bay Area book launch, Mrs. Dalloway's/Berkeley; July 30, 4-Eyed Frog, Gualala with Sharon Doubiago; August 4, Book Passage with Oscar Villalon in San Francisco; August 5, A Great Good Place for Books with Carolyn Cooke in Montclair, CA; later on, Merritt Bookstore and elsewhere . . .)

Until soon,

Yours in the moviesphere,

Edie

Newsletter up and running again

2011-06-01T13:00:00.001-07:00

Dear good readers,

Just to keep you in the loop: there's a newsletter (quaint word in this era of blogs, right? Can you remember the first person who savored the word "blog" as s/he said it to you? I can. San Francisco, circa 2000, a proud fire-dancer who liked to swerve around half-naked in the dark. Are these not,really, the way that blogs function?) at www.ediemeidav.com.

Go ahead. Subscribe again to something else. I promise to try to keep it interesting.

Yours in the logosphere,

Edie

Day of Onion, Day of Honey

2011-05-25T14:46:00.000-07:00

Here's today's kind review from Booklist. May I say that I feel understood? Is that kosher to say?

"As teenagers in the 1970s, Lana and Rose were typical BFFs: joined at the hip, flowing goddesses high on groovitude. Daring each other, baring their secrets, they tried on different mantles of pseudo-adulthood, with Lana emerging the stronger personality, Rose her willing supplicant. At the core of it all were Vic,Lana’s father, a counterculture guru with a cultlike following, and her mother, Mary, an early feminist educator. Stressed by the increased demands of his notorious career, however, Vic’s temper explodes one day, and he murders Mary in a fit of professional and romantic jealousy. Swiftly convicted and sentenced to death row, Vic is abandoned by his daughter but not her friend. Though Rose and Lana drift apart, attorney Rose makes it her life’s mission to track elusive Lana down in order to reunite her with Vic in
2008, just days before his execution—a meeting Lana works hard to avoid. In this intense and tumultuous tale, Meidav adeptly limns the dark and sinuous obsessions of friendship with penetrating insights. — Carol Haggas

From the Land of Sublime

2011-02-28T12:13:00.000-08:00

Okay, so this is the first and tardy post from the Latin country with monitored Internet access -- let's call it Sublime. Here in Sublime, where we are for two months, the socioeconomic intensity can so fill one's pores one must seek release in the volcanism of the music or dance here. Music becomes a way to gaze beyond the moat of the ocean.

Let that be enough for now, more later soon.

Happy Travel

2011-01-23T04:42:00.000-08:00

Here, in the spirit of all the advice-givers of our insecure era, are a few rules for happy travel to a place you have never been, based on a few researching-for-novel-writing trips I've taken:

1) Wherever you are, create a routine. It does not have to be elaborate; it can be as simple as having your morning drink in the same place every day. In this way, (repeated) time conquers the (foreign) space. On last week's trip to Nicaragua, for example, I went to the same dance class every morning, taught by a beautifully queenie and charismatic, slightly lazy instructor to young girls and big housewives and a few eager boy teens on a liability-seductive wooden floor strewn with nailheads in the hot center of Managua, across from the university site that has been a site for many student demonstrations. Something about dancing the cumbia across the floor every morning, the instructor sailing in happily always a half-hour late and animating the students, served as the perfect grounding device as well as an absurdist comment on all the recent, as well as older, political history of the country. In the Pyrenees, I used to have cafe au lait at the same small cafe across from the prefecture and learned too much about the local gossips this way.

2) Come with half the clothes and twice the money you think you need.

3) Any bit of language you know prior to departure will be magnified four-fold upon arrival, so try to have something proto-linguistic going on.

4) Read the local paper wherever you are.

5) Any contact you have prior to departure will, similar to #3, above, be magnified in its beneficent effects perhaps ten-fold. Even your uncle's old schoolmate's wife's sister's friend. It all helps. The only time this hasn't helped me -- I can think of one example -- was in Sri Lanka when a contact turned out to be something of a bibulous newspaper scion and, somewhere in my first month there, feeling romantically spurned, decided to publish a scandalous piece doing everything short of naming me in the tiny island's main English-language paper, going out to 18,000 people, turning me into something of a representative of the worst libertine ills of Western society, and quoting from a friend's letter to me he had procured and kept in his possession.

6) When moments of culture shock crowd, which they will if you are anywhere for an extended period, try to return to private routines of succor. Everyone has some form of this, whether it be yoga, writing a friend, keeping a journal.

7)Every interaction you have with anyone has potential for grace. Remember that.

8)Find the possibility of gratitude.

9) Learn the local way of doing laundry, cooking, etc.

10) Surrender all preconceptions. Discover others'.

11) A last addendum: except for in Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES and in the salons of eighteenth-century London, the karma of the traveler is to forever be a listener rather than a teller of travel tales.

That's all for now.

Little Video I Shot Yesterday in a Managua Boxing Gym

2011-01-15T16:41:00.000-08:00

I share this little video clip -- two young boxers fighting while a third dances around with the happiest, most foolish grin -- because I love the way that, in these gyms, vortices of intensity, every single kid says and believes he will be next world champion.

Perhaps the roughness of the video, shot on a handheld with which I'm nothing but amateur so far, does not hide the intensity of these kids.

So far, have talked with a few contenders and a few champions, and there is an intensity -- should we call it sophrosyne? -- to the guys who did make it. Discipline, clarity, purity, eyes on the prize: the champions have in spades what the contenders hope for.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1210773097

Black Swan: A One-Minute Film Review! The Movie That Dips Its Beak Toward Leda!

2010-12-29T15:52:00.000-08:00

BLACK SWAN, the new movie -- or rather Film, with a tottering capital F -- takes the self-v.-self plot conceit, throws it into a revamped La Boheme milieu, tosses in some horror tropes and pre-Beauvoir Cinderella psychology -- at times I found it unbearable to watch, both the prefabness of it all and the horror -- and yet moments of specificity hit that particular sweet-spot note of narrative inevitability, quivering between utter cliche and utter urgency, which could just about make a viewer's head spin around, several times and fast, a la the Exorcist.

The dancer I saw the Film with found it unbearable as well -- and yet. And yet.

Whatever it is, film, movie, last year's nightmare: it enters one's head like a virus from outer space, clenches in, resists forgetting, especially in the resplendence of its cliches. So does that, therefore, make it Oscar material?

Signed,
Uncurmudgeonly Unman*
*As a friend of mine says: only curmudgeonly men of a certain age don't like this movie.

**The music link, above, is just for fun. The movie trailer -- and not, mind, that I recommend you see this movie -- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaI1XOB-bs.

The Other White Meat

2010-12-26T05:57:00.000-08:00

An article on the Jewish Xmas Eve tradition of Chinese food and a movie, first published in 1992 in Contemporary Ethnography:

http://dragon.soc.qc.cuny.edu/Staff/levine/SAFE-TREYF.pdf

Bon appetit!

In Memory of a Late Teacher: Thesis and Antithesis

2010-12-24T05:37:00.000-08:00

To enter that high school European History classroom was to enter a sanctuary. You were being inducted into something much greater than you could access, you a freshman, he a teacher with consonants exploding klieg-fast and with a certainty you could never hope to muster. Let's have a summary, he'd splutter, and you would try to recover from your careful notes -- taken before in the marble notebook he demanded -- some simulacrum of the prospect view and theory of history on which he had lectured the day before. Years later, you revisit his syllabus, his careful crafting of European history, and marvel at how gracefully opinionated his ideas were, how much history he happily elided, and the absolute respect he extended to mostly American students by proffering them, on a filigreed silver platter, the absolutisms of his Europe.

The defenestration of Prague. Thesis (splutter) and antithesis (double splutter).

To this writer, having been schooled in Oakland-Berkeley public school with not much more to show for it than an acquaintance with Japanese kite songs, the Pate-Pate, and the best methods for incubating chicks, becoming a person who would never truly master which states border Minnesota, Mr. Crome's specificity and transcendence knocked away walls and created a vaulted intellectual cathedral. One could master history and form a thesis; even Herodotus was a kind of fiction writer; historiography already an imperiled pursuit. Come to history with some creativity, he seemed to imply, a stance which might have been a result of his brief past as a kid in the Hitler Youth, a student-borne "fact" which might have had no legs. A bad historian, I still don't know.

His head shone under fluorescence so brightly it seemed spit-polished, as was, perhaps, the careful curl of his forelock. In his being, he retained something of the blue-eyed boyish roue (accent over the e, but can't put it in here!) about him: I would always see him at Au Coquelet, the Berkeley cafe on University and Milvia, savoring with great nostalgia some pastry with layers of whipped cream which just about screamed opening night at the Bavarian opera house. In short, he was exactly the particular enigma students remember and savor, everyone held in the loving esteem which the school -- note "school" as a breathing, corporeal being -- showed its faculty as well as its students.

I remember Mister Crome talking to me on a walkway at what we still thought of as the new campus, telling me a term paper I had written on Descartes was a noble failure, and the phrase stuck: he offered me the epiphany of realizing ideas would forever be embedded in words as a kind of holy vestment, and that there would never be a way to sunder an idea from its representation in language. I could almost say my entire career (as a writer who seems unwillingly drawn, again and again, back to the idiosyncratic byways of history) could have come from the moment of realizing both the failure of my attempt and the nobility of the pursuit.

To the memory of Mister Hans Crome, therefore, to spit-curls and klieg-consonants, in gratitude, I raise the above cup of nostalgic froth.

Recognizing the Slave

2010-12-12T20:39:00.000-08:00

I had an odd encounter this evening, in person, with a spokesperson for a major demonic force in corporate America -- let the name of the big entity go unspoken for now, but let's just say it starts with W. And while at first I saw only the flat deadness in the eyes of this spokesperson -- so much like the eyes of a bigoted policeman I once had the fortune to meet off a highway in Whittier, California -- while this customer service manager spoke his party line, speaking American cust-serv glossolalia, while I lost any hope of seeing his humanity, by some grace I managed to do some internal jiujiutsu, and lo and behold, the conversation turned! There came into my proxy's gaze the merest flicker of humanity, clouds parting enough to reveal the slave in his eyes, the helpless proxy of our ironic country in which individuals march lemming-like toward corporations. This proxy, neither young nor old but already formed, this poor customer service manager seemed, before this signal moment, to have been speaking in tongues, but once I made what felt at the time to be an effort worthy of Hercules to see his slave, we started to have a simulacrum of real conversation.

Being able to recognize the slave in another's eyes: a gift capable of unlatching whatever keeps all our thousands of tiny inner slaves unnoticed.

Last Adventure in Nicaragua

2010-11-29T16:21:00.000-08:00

Last time I was in Nicaragua, I was sent up a volcanic mountain on the back of a burro laden with now surely old-fashioned GPS equipment: up that mountain, on those six jaded burros, went a pack of five brothers and myself. Supposedly I had come to Managua to act as a translator for my father who had long tried to bring alternative energy to Nicaragua. More about this father of mine: he did not, in fact, accompany us up the volcano. We were equipped, instead, with a few machetes, dulled slicers meant to clear brush as we rode forward on the burros' backs. And just a bit more about this father of mine, now dead two months: a benign idealist, one who always wished to see the best in human nature, he thought he was giving me the ultimate afternoon experience and giving the brothers, who had worked with him for a while, a chance to chat it up with his American daughter. Or god knows what he really thought; that afternoon, he had to be imprisoned in his favorite small Managua hotel, the Hotel Cesar where the duena knew he loved the flan, in a series of unconscionably endless meetings. Meanwhile, the fruit of his loins got to have pure experience, on burros, heading up a mountain.

More about this mountain, then: we rode up not into the sunset but setting forth at a very practical moment in the morning, laden with fruit and some sandwiches. I had thought to bring one bottle filled with boiled tap water, and it gave off an intestinal gurgle from where it jiggled in the horse's saddle-pocket. Very early in the trip, machetes flying left and right to clear our path, we pulled off to a shaded plateau and sat and, companeros of the road, broke bread together. In some essential tic, at that second, I remained my father's daughter, filled with a supremely blind joy: I was one with the people! We were all employed in hard labor together!

I think, in the tradition of cliffhangers, I will adjourn here and continue what ended up being a life-or-death experience in the jungle on another day . . .

The Only Exception

2010-11-24T21:36:00.000-08:00

Guess it makes sense if I promised a particular mentor NOT to write in this blog (and instead start stashing away words toward articles that will appear in old-fashioned Print Vehicles, the unfortunate moniker of magazines in our common era with its equally poorly named need for Content Provision) to at least give this entry (because it seems that once one has the habit of writing in this thing called a blog -- a useful cache-tout for the ideas we all have in our day, little tugs at the unconscious sparking out toward the walls and ending up, instead, captured within the frame -- something of the notating habit sticks) the forgiving title of my latest and happiest recent discovery in the world of music, and for all I know I am charting exactly the sine wave of some horribly predetermined pop sensibility so that when I speak of a band, it may already be etched deep in your mind, or at least in the consciousness of some lurking demographic unknown to me --

as if I were saying, back in the time of the Kennedys, yes, but did you happen to get a load of John F.'s WIFE? --

but all that said, I just saw, again from the same bunker-like physical locale in which I get to spy on contemporary culture, a video which speaks to so many themes that seem to have obsessed me recently, or to speak more truly, in these last couple of years finishing up this LOLA novel, that I just have to sing out its praises --

"The Only Exception" -- by Paramore -- a song which strikes me as a latterday heir to the song "The Real World" by the Bangles, itself an heir to any slow Beatles love song;

here again for the hypertext-happy is a link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-J7J_IWUhls

which, as a song by itself, without the video, after its intimate, confessional opening, might not fully stand up; my song jury's still out. The instrumental break leading to the cliche-ridden bridge becomes ponderous and predictable; singer Hayley loses, just a bit, what had started with a charm cousin to that of Jolie Holland (to whom I was introduced by the local Woodstock radio's constant trumpeting of her "Little Birds" song, her crackly voice making me curious, her articulation as if she were rolling marbles around in the back of her Texan mouth, only to see her charisma refracted in the unparalleled writing of Rick Moody, in The Rumpus, on her work, in which he declares "Mexican Blue" to be the best song of the millennium)

http://therumpus.net/2010/06/swinging-modern-sounds-24-a-magician-of-the-highest-degree/

but I was moved, a naif about Paramore, by the performance of naivete itself: Hayley's voice has the honesty of youth, and her persona in the video is that of the outcast, the boyish punk girl who found herself recast once she encounters herself as an adult. The kind of girl for whom GHOST WORLD was written.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0162346/

So the question is: what is it about certain voices that makes them simultaneously so knowing and fresh, and how do such voices seem to promise catharsis to their listeners?

The crackle followed by the clarity in the timbre of this kind of voice is an equivalent to what the French call jolie-laide, the beautiful-ugly effect, the beauty heightened by the chiaroscuro between rough rawness and the labored. My hunch is that this siren call acts as an equivalent to the authenticity we aim to hear in American fiction, the crackle of the ungrammatical against the smoothness of the epic.

In this highly crackly blog entry, on the eve of the holiday that celebrates the idea of the native and his misunderstood gift approaching a Pilgrim with grand designs, I wish I could go now into an aria, smooth and slippery, a whole nother bridge on Pilgrims: I wish I had time to describe the unfeigned anger of the actress playing a Puritan aboard the Mayflower, someone we met in a tiny ship's hold last summer when our oldest daughter begged for us to go to the historical recreation spot Plymouth Plantation, the kind of site I had thought occurred mainly in George Saunders' fiction -- but that really would be a story a whole crackle away, too big an exception even for this blog.

Happy Thanksgiving; and may your inner pilgrim and native unite.

PS Also, for what this is worth, the voice of Paramore's lead singer reminds me a bit of Brielle Korn, a New York-based pianist/songwriter who plays every Sunday at Jack in the Village in Manhattan, and sometimes at CBGBs. Another paean to vulnerability:

http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/briellekorn2

BEEF

2010-11-23T09:04:00.000-08:00

Hi!

Some asked where they could read the two stories of mine that received special mention in the 2011 Pushcart Prize collection: here for your Thanksgiving musing, published previously in CONJUNCTIONS, the great literary journal edited by Brad Morrow, is one of the stories, "Beef":

------------------------

BEEF

We take advantage of that friendliness that Southerners are supposed to have, you know, the gentleman thing. What happens is I come up close to the door, press my nose up to the glass everyone has out here, and one of these people comes to the door, could be an old lady, could be a guy, it doesn’t matter. I start talking real fast, sort of snowing it over them, which is why the guys call me The Tongue, as in you want something, get the Tongue. Meat, beef, I’ve got a lot, I say, I’ll give it to you, I’ll give it to you, cost me three hundred but I’ll give it to for one hundred fifty, I’m almost shouting, I’ll give it to you -- and behind me the other guys are holding these black cardboard boxes we use, and our van is puffing steam, our van which is also painted black, paint so thick we can’t even use the rear lock and have to open it from the inside.

And if the people who open the door raise their objections, like: I don’t have room in my freezer, I tell them, look, I’ve known freezers in my time and people don’t know how to use them, no need to get namby-pamby on anyone, and I sort of shoulder it past them to the kitchen and start arranging things better, because one thing people don’t know how to use is space and one American thing we know for sure is space. I start shoving in the beef, packages of sirloin and T-bone and all that, racks and hamburger patties, and I’m opening up the box and hefting stuff in there, and if they say they want to keep the box in case of returns I tell them no worries, it’s fine, I’ll recycle, I’ve got everything flat before they say lickety and before they say split they find themselves whipping out a pen and writing out a checkarooni for one hundred and fifty buckarupees, and if they don’t, it’s essentially highway robbery, because now we’ve got all our beef in their freezer, unpackaged, and possession is nine-tenths of the law, what can they do and anyway we’re gone before they think better.

And hey, it’s not like we’re taking anything from them, they get to have beef for a month of Sundays, sauce it up anyway they like, some people would die to eat beef, and okay it’s not that prissy stuff, none of that pure free-range cock and bull stuff, that grain-eating mushmush, this is real cow slaughter. We’re talking choose your cut and take it between your jaws, bloody or barbecued or what have you.

This is what the lone cattle farmer has to do in our time. I mean, I’m not that guy but I’m hired by a guy who works with a guy who works with that guy, one local guy who’d never let me use his name but I feel for him, I do, and anyway when I got out of the hoosgaw after those domestic incidents what other jobs were open to me, I mean it wasn’t like some national company was going to hire me to drive a brown truck delivering parcels or anyone would trust me decorating their cakes or whatever pissant job people find when they need to get by. If my mom weren’t sick I wouldn’t be doing this beef racket, because that’s what it is, a racket, who are we fooling here, but money is money and truth is, it’s sort of fun, the choice of a house, the way you zero in like a detective, circling. Trick is you got to look for markers that someone isn’t really comfortable in his skin, like maybe you see someone with one of those cutesy mailboxes that show they’re living out here because they think it’s quaint, not someone throwing their trash out unbagged on their lawn but someone poking a rake at leaves as if yesterday someone introduced the whole idea of rakes to him. Or you see someone wearing his jeans a little too tight. Once you’re done spotting, don’t move in right away, you wait a while and come back in an hour, you have your guys with you, and the thing depends on speed, which means that after a good take, inside the truck, you are high as kites. This is pure adrenaline without any guilt to tug it down, because after all didn’t you just sell a decent product at decent markdown?

The only other job I’ve been able to get is working for the campaigns, I mean, at night, going around and removing signs the other guy has put up, people know me around here, in the electioneering scheme of things they don’t call me Tongue, they call me Steam because I get away so fast, as in: you need a job done, you call Steam. Only it’s these new people, the out-of-towners and northerners who drift south because their cities are turning into habitats for rats living on top of each other, prime target for a terrorist bomb, it’s the escaping rats who don’t understand the way we do things. Just for the record, the way you collect election signs is you stack them on a corner at night and then come back an hour later, no one really notices. All these endeavors depend on patience, you got to wait that hour before you scoop up the other guy’s signs and then go drive to the river and throw them in the water so that even if they want to use them, they would look all bad and waterlogged and who’s going to vote for someone whose signs are mildewed? It’s a sign you should kick yourself out of the race, right? And the river’s always better than going to the county dump, because anyone can dig up a sign from a dump.

When I was in Basra I was called Steam for a whole nother reason. I was in Basra but back in Bentonville, where I lived for a little bit just out of high school, I had Cherilyn waiting for me. Cherilyn I’d met when she’d auditioned for the kind of bar where the bartenders dance and sing on top of the bar and she hadn’t made it, they’d told her she was tops in the personality department but wouldn’t be good for sales, she’d been sitting curbside outside the bar, crying just before happy hour on a Friday, a girl whose cheeks were so fresh you felt you’d get the first bite out of an apple, if you know what I mean. She felt I understood the troubles of her life and why getting this bar job meant so much. All the other guys in my unit were jealous about Cherilyn, whose mama had gotten her wallet photo retouched so that no matter how many times I took it out of my kit Cherilyn still looked like one hot apple.

The bad thing that happened two days before Christmas in Basra was basically that I was eating some turkey soup out of a can when we hear this explosion and everyone goes down, I mean everyone, and even my can gets knocked out of my hand, all I have left is the spoon in my hand and that’s the dumb luck of a survivor. The only guys who didn’t buy the farm that second were me and the corporal who was about fifty yards away pulling down his pup. That one-night recon ended up, basically, a life sentence because in the bargain I lost everyone but the corporal who hadn’t been especially a friend of mine, though the moment did bond us, especially after we had to haul one of my buddies to the medevac that came too late because how can anyone get there in time to keep life flowing?

The soup incident is why I got a purple heart, even though it didn’t take much bravery on my part, just the dumb luck I have, they gave me a heart making up for all those other lost hearts, which is also why I got to see this head-shrink now because some wires got crossed, I mean who wouldn’t need help. Like say you stared down the mouth of a nuclear reactor, wouldn’t you think you were ready for some help? Not everyone gets blown up and just has his stupid soup spoon left in his hands.

Which probably in a roundabout way explains how I got into the beef racket, the whole thing with my buddies and then Cherilyn walking out -- we had a few domestic incidents, cops called, all that, but really she walked because I didn’t hang on her every word and then she fell in love with some fellow boytoy prisoner friend of mine who only thought about lifting weights so he could update his photo on the prisoner web site at the same time as he was legally changing his name to Dream Big -- all that just did a number on me, and when I got out, Tony suggested I help him out in a new business venture with guaranteed profit each month, he kept saying, guaranteed, right when I was ripe for anything guaranteed, prayer wasn’t doing the trick and also it had gotten too depressing staying at home with ma all the time waiting for the veteran’s check to thud in with all the other mail asking us to go out and buy things on the cheap. And I wasn’t ready to start calling anyone Your Honor. You can see how it made sense.

So what happens is I’ve stocked the beef in someone’s freezer and even got them to the point of sale, that’s what it’s all about, you get them to use their pen and sign the check and put it in your hand, and any objections they raise along the way you’re like okay, I understand, your answers ready like little soldiers. And then we’re out the door, vanished like the shine on some Christmas decorations the day after you’ve taken the tree down when it doesn’t really matter anymore that you just had all this expectation hanging on getting something. This is not evil. If it were evil, I’d be a liar or someone would’ve stopped me already, because I’m not such a big guy, a fact that I got reminded of a thousand times a day in the hoosgaw. It’s just that my bald head makes me look taller or tougher, I can’t stop shaving it since I got home from Iraq, so though Cherilyn used to say I had super-kind eyes or at least did until the day she stopped saying it, it’s probably my eyes draw them in while my shiny head is probably what keeps people from slamming and locking the door in my face. They’re scared.

And you’d think that even after we leave they’d stop the check but they never do, probably stand a long while in the kitchen shaking their heads, trying to figure themselves out. Probably feel too foolish to want to explain it to Tanya at the bank, as in, Tanya, please stop my check because I just got taken in by the Beef Boys, which is the name we incorporated as, the name we ask them to use for the checks, and Tanya isn’t about to help them out either, being that Tanya’s a good local girl who understands that everyone out here does what he’s got to do. Especially because out here we’ve got God country on our side, that’s what we call it on days when you see dads standing around with their sons around the back of a flatbed, unloading a two- hundred-pound hulk of deer, everyone struck dumb by the fact that they’re still living and that stupid animal just kicked it.

People ask okay did something happen in Iraq that made you go into this line of business and usually I don’t talk about the soup-spoon moment, it’s too much a tearjerker, so I can’t think of anything except the one thing which is that time we were crossing this little bay which I won’t name because it was supposed to be a no-fly zone but our fuel supply was low and we see this little action hero sort of gasping somewhere out in the water, and I was not myself that day, I can’t explain it, I asked Johnny who’d been pressed into flight even though as corporal all he’d ever done was go to some military academy and get shipped out too young, barely knew how to man a copter, given that he was younger than I was, a fact I never let him forget, but on this day I was trying to eject something out of my throat, so I said let’s go down, Johnny, I think that hero’s one of our men, which I didn’t really, but how can you explain days when you’re not yourself? Everyone has them, I’m as good as the next guy. Still we get closer and I see the hero’s not on our side, not at all, he has one of these superlong mullah beards, as we call them, not mullet as in long bad haircut from some 1970s band but mullah as in super-evil trainer of young jihad minds trained to battle the U.S.A.

Like the guy might be one of the priests those guys have out there. But something’s hitting me, maybe because it’s morning of Christmas Eve and we all should’ve been home two months ago or I don’t know, I’ve gone a little soft on account of the soup-spoon incident, so I feel soft toward him, and this even after what I’d seen the day before. We scoop Mullet up in our copter, I say mullet because their hair is long in front not in back, and we’re supposed to be heading to Basra to pick up some replenishment of our medical supplies which have run low given our events, plus the fact that we’ve been bunkered in Bazookistan for two and a half months. And there Mullet is in the helicopter with us, spitting up water and smelling like something just dragged through major sewage, if you know what I mean, probably soiled himself. The problem is he doesn’t speak much English and the Arabic rattling in my head is really not that useful, stuff like koos emuk, which means your mother’s private parts! And other choice words which I won’t share here. I don’t know why, but certain things stick better than the how are yous? And please turn around and raise your hands over your head? that we had drilled in us during pre-op. I can’t help it, my head’s not really sorted out for languages, but at least I remember one or two choice elements.

So here this guy is gasping and I hit on it, like something we could do for him, give him back some dignity, I go digging in my rucksack and I pull it out, it’s a little mushed, but it’s still okay, this hoagie like we used to call it back in training camp near Phillie, I pull it out and true the meat is mushed and true it’s dripping but still it’s prime USDA, sent in a Hugs from Home package filled with diaper wipes and graham cookies when what most guys really want are magazines and beef, even if ladies and beef both come freeze-dried.

And the guy at first looks happy when he sees the puffy part of the bread, he’s skinny like a bird and hungrier, because even if someone has a different color of skin and different way of thinking you can still figure out the basic human things, this is one thing I’ve learned, hunger anger love self-defense, but he’s saying something we can’t understand, muttering and spitting out a kind of question, so we’re just smiling and saying aiwa and la, kind of at the same time, yes and no, which are words that even I can remember though neither of us really at that moment remembers how to say anything else.

So what he does is take a bite and chews and it only takes him a half-second before he spits it out and says something which I think might be the word for infidels but could just as easily be the word for disgusting, and that does it, I mean I’ve had it, what with the soup thing with my buddies only the day before and here I am sharing my last KP with him when we had a three-hour flight at least to get to Basra, me with my low blood sugar and him with the nerve to spit it out because it’s not cut to his liking or whatever. It’s cut wrong supposedly because the animal suffered and I’m all like who doesn’t suffer? Is suffering a reason to reject someone’s courtesy? I say not.

So I say: let’s drop him.

Just like that, let’s drop him.

Plus the corporal doesn’t even bat an eye, he’s all like aye-aye sir, kind of roasting my bones because I’m a private but I don’t care, he’s with me on the dropping of Mullet idea. So we’re over some compound, I can’t tell what it is, one of those secret government installations that are everywhere, they’re on the maps like empty rectangles with squares jostling around inside, and we just do it, we force Mullet out, we drop him inside one of those cement blocks, maybe everyone has fled, maybe he gets locked inside, who knows. These guys can be super-crafty, have subterranean tunnels like moles. And Mullet can’t believe we’re doing it to him, I can still see his narrow longbeard face looking up right before we pull away, shielding his eyes from the wind of the copter blades but still shouting at us. Okay, so even after I say that Mullet will figure out a way to escape because he has Allah on his side, the corporal seems too rattled to even crack a smile. When Mullet really deserved something, treating us with such inhospitality when there we were trying to rescue him, plus I shared my last sandwich with him, and the best thing he could think to do is call us infidels?

Which is all kind of a tangent but maybe it explains why I got so bothered last Saturday when we came to this prissy kind of door, the kind with painted birdboxes in front of it, as if our birds here don’t have any place to go find shelter, and the guy who shows up at the door looks sort of concerned, has one of those pasty Northern cityfolk am-I-doing-it-right, I’m-still-a-foreigner-here sort of faces. He actually has paint stripes on his clothes, so I figure he must be one of those gentleman artsy painters because there is no way in freezing buck county that the guy is a house painter, I’d never let him touch one of my walls, inside or outside.

His wife has vanished like an aroma upstairs, I just saw her white ankles vanishing, and it is probably out of fear of the evangelicals who run rampant in these parts and who you got to be on guard against because they’ll talk your ear off for a million months of Sundays and never let you get down to business, and they almost put us out of business because now some people don’t even answer their doors.

But this is one pasty-looking mother staring at me, and he starts trying to out-egg me, you know, talking some breed of stuff about how he doesn’t need beef, doesn’t even eat it, being one more of these blue-veined vegetarians starting to infest our land, and I’m smiling at him like I can’t believe this, like what kind of guy would you really be in bed, I mean I’m not exactly about to say anything, insults tend to put off sales, first thing you learn, because I’m not in the intimidation racket, just into the speech-and-speed thing. Then he starts asking all sorts of questions and it’s not like I have any ready answers to his questions, and I’m starting to get a little pissy, because things are not going according to plan, and it’s like when he says what are you fighting about? I try not to lose it and say I’m not fighting, that was before, and when he asks is the world black-and-white I say only if you say so and for whatever reason I’m thinking of our copter and I see this painter smiling in some way that makes him seem twice as crazy. He starts taking the beef, just ripping open the packages and throwing beef onto these massive iron skillets he has, I’m not kidding, frying up our goods in his kitchen which is painted all these godforsaken colors, aqua or pumpkin or whatever they call those colors, cooking it up, and I would’ve left by now but I’m not kidding, the guy’s wife is quicker than she looked, she came back smiling herself, smelling of vanilla perfume but basically using surprise tactics that made this one vet look bad, because she got me tied me to their kitchen chair with two extension cords which for the life of me I can’t undo. Must have had a brother in the Boy Scouts or what have you. At this point I’m bellowing like a ram in heat and stomping all what out but who’s going to hear me out here? No one. And she keeps interrupting her husband whose eyes could be those of a serial murderer, I’m not kidding, keeps interrupting to say you want me to call 911?

You’re not supposed to do this, I say, trying to calm everyone down including myself. How it’s supposed to go is you’re supposed to let me free now. Right here you should be signing the check and --

And he says we’ll just keep him here. The thing they used on me was surprise, which I’m still feeling embarrassed about given how you’d think basic training plus my current line of work would have prepped me for better, but he’s frying up the beef and I’m sitting there tied up and then he’s serving it to me, not with sauce or anything, holding my nose to make me open my mouth and at first I’m just spitting it out onto my lap or the floor, wherever I can reach, and I’m thinking what kind of justice is this, me forced to eat my own beef, but the more I spit the more he shoves it in so I figure I better just start swallowing. If it’s so good, he’s saying, you think we’re rubes or something? People you can just get something over on? And I keep eating, it’s okay, not raw or anything, not like the desert lizard-flesh I had to eat once, but it’s also sort of disgusting, it’s like I can see the meat there on his counter, the Freez-R-Pak starting to melt, losing its value as Tony would say, and I can’t tell which is killing me more, the fried meat or the sight of profit dwindling. And my voice is weaker than I mean it to be, I say, if you don’t mind, would you please mind just putting those packages back in the freezer?

Because for everything that I sell for one hundred and fifty, I’ve had to shell out fifty, so it’s like if everything goes bad, I mean I could sell it but I don’t want to get anyone sick with E. Coli, that’s not my business, I never volunteered for the nerve-gas patrol if you know what I mean. I just don’t want to lose money, you understand. I’m thinking of ma at home waiting for me to bring her home a carton of cherry ice cream like I do whenever I make a decent sale, and I’m almost about to explain but the guy’s talking too much, out-tonguing me basically. Meanwhile the guy’s wife has disappeared again when I’d had the sense she was my only hope, something about her white ankles and vanilla scent and the way she knew to tie knots.

Not to go on too long but I’d say my guys apparently had vanished from outside, worse than steam, showing no loyalty, and I’m sitting there about three hours telling by their folksy-cute kitchen clock that cuckoos in the voice of every different kind of bird. Three hours later and this crazy couple finally decides alright, it’s enough, they’re going to untie me. They’ve made me eat all the beef, the guy has even said back to me the thing I had said to him, which is that possession is nine-tenths of the law. Being tied up had gotten me confused and I’d started saying things out of sequence.

So that was yesterday. At least I got out with my pants on.

We have enough houses tucked away in the hills that I could be in business for a whole nother year before shifting to another line of work, and it would’ve helped out ma with her payments for her lung cancer, that stupid doctor she goes to once a week who makes her breathe into a breathalyzer or whatever just to chart her lungs. None of it makes sense, and nothing lasts forever, I tell my ma whenever she complains but she sort of chucks me on the head and says Jimmy you used to be a decent kid, used to be able to figure numbers in your head so quick, and I let her treat me like I’m six because the old lady has gotten some marbles loose and there’s no way I’m going to ever forget I’m all she has, this is why I’m so steady with the cherry ice cream except for yesterday. Not to mention that she has reminded me that I’m all she has practically every day since my dad was locked away and me only eight and allowed to see him once a month at visiting hours. Which is all a long way of saying I’ve changed my tactics, I’m a reformed man. Which also means I see the world in a new way and look, you gave me your time, it hurts me but I’m just about ready to give it to you.

Forbidden Books

2010-11-15T08:01:00.000-08:00

Remember how somewhere deep into their darkest period the Nazis had an exhibit of degenerate art? Art so expressive, it must have been made by outsiders? This as a kind of interesting bookend to the art made for public display by those sequestered in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, turned into art puppets, art as pabulum for the guilty conscience?

Well, I don't know why exactly, or I do, as I write this, but I was thinking of the Nazis in relation to the idea of taboo art: what, really, in our hellbent age is taboo anymore? Where, in other words, can you get the thrill of a book that seems to have toppled off some kind of shelf not really meant for your sensibility?

And the quick two-step: do you remember which books your parents read -- to themselves! the great unimaginable of that! -- which seemed to you to be so insuperably adult?

For me, two signal taboo-book events occurred: one was my mother's creased copy of FEAR OF FLYING, with its cover boasting a woman's waist in peach tones -- odd, actually, now that I realize this; the cover of this next novel seems to share some lineage with this new cover for LOLA, CALIFORNIA.

The other had to do with my witnessing my mother receiving a cardboard shipment of books by Lawrence Durrell, THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTET -- the exoticism of that, back in the Quality Paperback Club era, prior to Amazon -- a set of books whose random purple phrases, whenever I could sneak a peek, far better than the dictionary page in my elementary school's anatomical diagrams, or the 1970s classic lying around, OUR BODIES, OURSELVES, connoted a world of travel and passion.

A few years later, still a kid, I chanced upon the book MY FAMILY AND OTHER ANIMALS by Lawrence Durrell's little brother Gerald, a memoir, in my memory at least, about the time the family lived on Corfu with a whole range of British expostulations and friendly eccentric locals, heir and ancestor both to the hoary literary lineage that sets up the traveler as composed of equal parts sensitivity, sensibility and prejudice approaching the great unknown.

The reader as prejudiced traveler: how in our time can the taboo ever again be restored to reading? The frisson felt by, say, readers picking up the first edition of Defoe's MOLL FLANDERS, not knowing whether the hybrid beast in their hands qualified as the newly minted concept of fiction or not.

Do adults ever feel that kids' frisson when reading?

Recently I had to say no to reviewing a book -- don't want to say which one -- which felt as if it were a kind of provocateur's play on a huge societal calamity, sort of a jeu des mots borrowing the shock of the extratextual reference without bringing in anything of worth. No play, insight, articulation or expansion of human boundaries.

Taboo as a kind of border-patrol.

I'd be interested in hearing of others' taboo books: which seem(ed) to promise the kind of magic kids now scramble toward Harry Potter in pursuit of --? You fill in.

The Era of Connectivity

2010-11-14T09:31:00.000-08:00

In this era, when is too little a good thing? Yesterday I had the good fortune of having some friends spontaneously decide to mount a memorial moment for my father, dead now more than a month, out here in what might well always stay a kind of diaspora for me, the old granite of New York as opposed to the shifting tectonics of California where my father (never knew what to call him in life, never know what to call him in death), a geophysicist in diaspora from his earliest days, one dedicated to this deepest of movements beneath the earth's surface, now lies buried in a pine box in earthquake country: only one New York friend had met him in person, playing harmonica from deep inside the confines of his favorite black armchair.

Yesterday these particular friends met in the orange-walled studio that has let me sustain one long unbroken Renaissance dream -- one of the greatest gifts to my writing life I have ever known -- and of course conversation always gets interesting when people start sharing ghost stories: the negative space around our lives, however real or fabulistic, starts defining all the important impalpables around the life lived. One friend with a troubled relation with her mother spoke of the beauty of finding how much more direct became her communication with her mother starting seconds after the mother's death.

My own little three-year-old daughter had told me, three days after his death but before the funeral, that she had seen Saba in the house, her grandfather having regained use of his legs, and that his ghostly apparition had scared her; she had needed to run and hide. Here, less is a good thing: "I saw Saba and he could walk and I was scared and ran away."

Similarly, a few hours before his death, while we were still in upstate New York, before we knew he'd been taken to a California hospital, this same daughter had gone on one unstoppably emphatic conversational jag, prior to bedtime, about how sometimes people end up in a hospital, sometimes they come out but lots of times they just plain old die. Okay, I had said, that's great -- deep in the muffliing logic of adults -- think you're ready to put on pajamas now?

Some of my friends would say my little one in her late-breaking hospital update was channeling Saba: that, being less muffled, less filled with information, she was able to receive the message about his impending death a bit more directly. That, in other words, Saba chose the most unfilled flute, a three-year-old girl, in which to pipe the knells.

So one question might be: how empty or filled do you need to be in order to recognize truth? So much of this Internet usage, even this ungainly construct of a blog, has to do with belief that being filled is a good thing. We hide, as readers always do, lurking and taking in information, believing that a particularly contemporary and magical silvery information, all these pixel bullets, will help us better navigate lives which paradoxically have become more complex because we must be superheroes in dodging bullets to accomplish anything of meaning. But we continue on, belief morphing into compulsion, silent in our lurking, navigating, dodging, reading, meanwhile creating some kind of noise, what Benedict Anderson called imagined communities of readers, linked around the page.

Ever since a best friend of mine was killed when I was fourteen, I considered the motivating spirit of writing to be made up of elegy: in absence, we trace the missing forms, the ghostly outlines, the desire to represent now, in text, the idea or person or movement that happened before, though such scripting can also move into the future, inviting the unknowable in the purest spirit of fiction.

In that orange studio yesterday, we boiled down the gift of my father to me: his belief in my potential. In so many of the recent stories that have flown my way about dead or dying parents, I have come to recognize how rare was this particular commodity: sheer belief.

It takes little, as one friend said yesterday, to love a child. Children are inherently lovable, we tend to think; yet the belief in a child's future offers, if not a script for the future, at least a bare tablet.

For you, then, imagined community, to fill in below?

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PS The kind of blogs I have admired have been those like Conversational Reading (http://conversationalreading.com) in which a wise docent shares sensibility through a specific terrain, helping cleave a path through the onslaught, or those in which the sensibility is just so raw and candid, you feel your subjectivity exploded, expanded, reframed. Not sure yet what this one will be.

Birth of a Blog and the Band NER*D

2010-11-12T17:31:00.000-08:00

Here's an odd way to start a conversation, but start it will: in a random moment of pop-culture consumption, I caught sight of a band which surely is so well known, my citing it here will only prove the randomness of my dip into the honeybath of contemporary America.

It was the band from Virginia Beach called N*E*R*D, its asterisks flying high defiant -- http://n-e-r-d.com/about if you are a hypertexter - and what struck me as much as the lead singer's androgynous charisma, his cool control of the semiotics of hiphop, the throatiness of his back-up singers, as much as the train-blast of R &B from some destination still living somewhere smack inside the decade that began in 1968, a real bass spitting at the rhythm, as much as the moves so Dionysian and self-pleasuring in their excess performed onstage by two wild girls that they threatened to split the stage as much as their already split jeans, was the oddity of a band composed of anyone who could trace some kind of descent back to Africa but for the keyboardist, the one guy whose face was completely covered with both odd eyegear and a mugger's ski mask.

The brilliance of it struck me: this was the kind of involuted minstrelsy I felt growing up as a white kid in the era of busing back in Berkeley, often the only white kid in the class, wishing I had not been born so melanin-deficient, going to schools with principals named Big Daddy, becoming proficient in performing all sorts of Black Panther handshakes eyes closed, seconds flat. How brilliant and oddly correct to have the one white wannabe in the ski mask, and how badly I wish I could have time-traveled back to that long-ago corridor in Martin Luther King Junior High when for the fortieth time a particularly naughty group of girls caught up and razzed me; how I wished back then some mask fairy might have descended into those anodyne halls and offered some first and final redemption.

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Birth of a Blog and the Band N*E*R*D

Birth of a Blog and the Band NER*D